Current Exhibition

On Saturday, August 18th, a group of artists will open six solo shows (sculpture and painting). The works will be on display through September 9th with a reception for the artists on Saturday, August 18th from 6:00 until 8:00 p.m.

Main Galleries

Herbert Reichert

“I paint so as to reach out my hand like a beggar. To show you there is more here than easily meets the eye. I withhold most conventional forms of beauty in order to force you to look past the cascading blacks into that dark region of our shared subliminal awareness. These paintings are not easy to like, but I promise, the deeper you look, the more you will discover. You are not alone.”

Herbert Reichert, 2018

Sculpture Garden

Christopher Cairns

Recognition/Remembrance

“I have been making sculpture for over 50 years. I encountered my first sculpture, a 4th dynasty Egyptian reserve head, in Boston, while on an evening college-course museum visit that changed my life. Later at Oberlin, I drew great inspiration from Norman Tinker, an artist I worshiped, even though he

said almost nothing to me. What he did do was give me validation and encouragement to keep doing sculpture. I later learned everything that I could from Peter Agostini, working as his assistant for 3 years.

Agostini taught me to look instinctually, and hard – and ultimately to draw. I gained fuller artistic independence through contact with individuals I admired and emulated by trying to do what they did or what I thought they did.

I think of myself as a member of a 7,000-year-old guild of sculptural image makers, going back to Ain Ghazal. I feel connected artistically and spiritually to many artists of the past, some known; many unknown. Sculpture has been practiced for thousands of years, in every part of the globe, by every permutation of human being imaginable. Much of it is strikingly primitive, direct and without artifice. Much of it is also anonymous, an idea with which I resonate. The concept of originality as the ultimate goal in art does not interest me. I am committed instead to a thorough line of practice and discovery that transcends the individual artist.

Within this larger world of sculpture, I seek visual and mythological associations from the art of the past, including Hellenistic, Roman, Medieval, Aztec, Coptic, Indian, and 19th-century works. Among modern sculptors, Medardo Rosso has long been my favorite.

Making sculpture for me is a silent and Shamanistic activity. I work from dreams and take cues from experience — recorded in my dreams, drawings, and memory — fashioning sculpture that draws on the same thematic pool that has fed many artists of the past: adoration, metamorphosis, death, suffering, redemption – and love.”

Christopher Cairns, 2018

Recognition/Remembrance is a set of six bronze figures clustered in a group. They are life-size figures. Each of the figures embodies some form of hostility, timidity, introspection, or fearful hesitancy. Collectively, they intentionally display a feeling of ambiguous action and confrontational inertia — they are perhaps going somewhere – or nowhere.

The sculptures were originally fashioned in clay and cloth

Carriage House, First Floor

Joel Longenecker

Recent Work

“Ice ages come and go. The earth’s surface, ever-changing, becomes scarred, polished and gouged. I’m interested in how the painting process – applying, drying, scraping and reapplying-parallels the geological processes of expansion and contraction, build-up and erosion. In my work, layers of paint are like the layers of the earth, each one consuming and burying the preceding one.

My aim is to push paint to new limits, past descriptive mandates, in pursuit of nature itself. I work until the paint falls into its destined place and becomes something else: fields, wood, rock, moss. The drama of that experience is my true subject.”

Joel Longenecker, 2018

Carriage House, Second Floor

John Lippert

Paintings

“Growing up in the 70’s and 80’s, I convinced myself that making art was akin to the great adventures of exploration, science, and invention. I grew up with Star Trek, Star Wars, comic books…and confused the aesthetics of science fiction with hard science. I remember endlessly drawing (designing) virtual reality orbs within which one could embryonically rest and (through artificial excitement of all 5 senses) explore other worlds. I drew control panels, including knobs and television screens and calculator buttons, and taped the drawings to furniture to role play the captaining of spaceships. Today, my studio practice is geared toward the same sense of exploration.”

Fran Shalom

Getting Out of the Way

“I am a modernist abstract painter with a pop sensibility. My works balance the formal with the playful, paring down shapes and ideas into their most basic forms. It is a search for clarity and humor, as is evidenced by the shapes and colors in my paintings: cartoony, bright, blobby as well as the interplay between figure/ground. Ultimately, it is important that the viewer becomes involved with the paintings, tempting them to stay long enough with the images to connect to a narrative that is at once ambiguous yet taps into the specifics and subtleties of their own lives.”